Loveland

Author's Note:

There is no sex in Part 1. Its purpose is to provide the context of the story and describe the personalities of the two main protagonists. Because his five-part story is probably best read in one go, I will post remaining parts roughly once every three days.

*****

Prologue

I remember which Interstates we travelled. We started in Seattle and gradually made our way in a jagged line across the northern and central part of the country. The plan was to drop us off in Philadelphia while they continued to Boston. This plan took a turn when they did not continue to Boston. Only she did.

Yet, I don't remember much of what I saw in detail. For reasons I will explain shortly, the eleven days that it took us to cross the country was, in many respects, a blur. We spent time in national and state parks. We visited historical sites as we came across them. We took in a wide variety of America's cultural offerings.

Maybe I'm getting old. I am a senior after all, a person who is 65 years or older. But mostly, I blame my female companion, and not in a negative way, but in a good way. She diverted my attention away from sightseeing and caused me to focus on her. She gave me unforgettable experiences of our time together and memories that I will cherish until the day I die.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me go a little further back in time.

I'm Peter. It's not my real name of course. I'm just protecting the guilty, me, as well as the innocent, Lucy, Kaye and Hal.

"I'm 5-11 and 170 pounds. My eyes are blue. My hair, which was blond in my youth, but has now turned mostly gray. I'm an average-looking guy. Some people would think of me as quiet and unassuming, even dull or staid, an impression that results from the fact that I'm a relatively introverted guy who has been totally faithful to his wife for many years. Although I came across a few exceptionally attractive, sexy women over the years, and sometimes engaged in some mild flirtation with them, I never strayed from marriage. I am no Priapus, Casanova, Don Juan or Lothario.

I'm also a relatively simple man with fairly simple needs. I love my wife. Her name is Lucy. I don't drink, gamble, smoke or do drugs. I bowl with my friends and I ball with my wife. I don't like complications. Through the decades of my marriage, I never chased another woman.

I was of the view that one woman has been more than enough for me or, it could just as easily be argued, all that I could handle. The potential risks and costs involved in having an affair were just too high, as far as I was concerned, in money, time, and emotional energy. I guess, if I have anything negative to say about my relationship with Lucy, it was the fact that sex with her had become routine, dull and infrequent.

But sometimes, life takes unexpected twists. My story is about one of those twists when, thanks to fortuitous circumstances, I found myself on a cross-country road trip with a friend, Kate, during which we had a brief, but torrid love affair.

But I'm getting ahead of myself again. So, please let me back up again to the beginning.

Kryptonite Kate

My wife and I met this slightly older couple, Kate and her husband Hal, about two years ago. We were on a land tour in Argentina that took us to places like Buenos Aires, a.k.a., the Paris of South America, Mendoza, where we were able to sample a variety of Argentinean wines, and the spectacular Iguaçu Falls, to name just three.

I have to confess I started gravitating to Kate the first time I set eyes on her, but nothing happened. We were travelling with our spouses as part of a larger group of tourists. I expected, at first, that we would be no more than travelling acquaintances, and then that would be it.

But we got along very well, especially Kate and me. We found that we had a lot in common, in some respects more with each other than with our own spouses. We were simpatico. Our friendship as two couples was at least partially driven by the unusual compatibility between Kate and me.

At the end of our guided tour, we decided to exchange email addresses and phone numbers and agreed to keep in touch. Once every few weeks, Kate and I exchanged emails.

About a year later, the four of us decided to meet up again and go on a road trip through the southwestern states. Kate and Hal picked us up in Los Angeles where they had stayed with Hal's relatives for several days.

We drove through southern California. We headed toward Arizona until we reached the Grand Canyon. From there, we drove to Las Vegas where we spent a couple of nights taking in some shows and enjoying the sights and sounds of the city.

Nothing happened in Vegas that needed to stay in Vegas. But one little incident illustrated how unusual a person Kate was.

I had noticed some guy handing out cards to passers-by. As I habitually ignore people who handout leaflets, I ignored him too and did not so much as glance at what he was handing out. Kate, who was literally a little old lady, walked up to him and took some of what this guy was handing out. She came back to the three of us and then handed me what she had taken from him, a handful of business cards with pictures of women, displaying big tits and nice asses, not to mention their telephone numbers.

Lucy and Hal laughed at my embarrassment. I took it like a man.

I pocketed the business cards. At the very least, I had a story to tell my friends, after which I would pull all the business cards, show them, and hopefully titillate or scandalize them.

From Las Vegas, we headed in a northwesterly direction so as to visit several of central and northern California's national and state parks. We eventually made out to the Pacific coast, spent a couple of days in the San Francisco area before heading along the coast back to Los Angeles, before returning home.

During this whole road trip, the four of us lived in much closer quarters than we had in Argentina. We shared the driving costs and paid for our own accommodations. We ate together. We saw the sights together. In the evenings, we would share a wine together and talk about whatever came to mind. We were each other's company.

As the days passed, Lucy and I also saw that there was some palpable tension between Kate and her husband, Hal. At the very least, they appeared to be going through a rocky period in their relationship. Occasionally, a short, sharp fight would bubble up with Kate usually brow-beating Hal into submission.

Whenever they disagreed, she clearly thought she was right almost all the time. The truth was that she actually was right most of the time, at least about the facts, but she made him look and feel stupid.

On the occasions when she was wrong, she was at best very reluctant to concede her mistake and usually acted as if she had made no mistake at all. When she was in attack mode, she seemed to lack a self-awareness, an inability to understand how she made Hal. I would have upbraided her if I were in his shoes.

As attracted to her as I was to her, I thought it was entirely inappropriate for her to humiliate her husband in the presence of other people.

At one point, Kate and Hal let slip out that they were sleeping in separate bedrooms. No wonder!

Lucy and I pretended that we did not hear what we heard. I filed the information in my mind in its trivia department.

Some people would have characterized Kate as a bitch. I didn't. But my view of her was coloured by my attraction to her. Nevertheless, objectively speaking, based on what I had seen, I would have characterized her as a shrew.

What is the difference between a bitch and a shrew? In the natural world, they are two entirely different mammals. The former is a female canine and the latter is small omnivorous creature that looks like a mouse.

When talking about human females, a bitch is a woman whose behaviour is unpleasant and difficult to deal with. For Hal, her husband, she was a bitch. However, she was respectful to me because I was her friend who, in her own way, she acknowledged as her equal. One does not behave like a bitch to a friend because if one does, one loses one's friend. At the same time, I could not ignore her occasional displays of bad temper or her aggressiveness, which are characteristics that define a shrew.

We, that is, my wife and I, agreed that Hal was very definitely pussy-whipped. The force of Kate's personality seemed to overwhelm him. My wife thought she was too strong. I thought he was too weak. We were both right. If he had a red line that his wife should not cross, he seemed unwilling or unable to stop her from crossing it.

I have believed that relationships work bester when different personalities understand each other's boundaries. Otherwise the relationship will fail. Since both Kate and Hal were on their second marriage, we had to wonder if they were capable of learning anything from their past experiences.

My wife and I did not interfere or even ask about their relationship. We stayed away from that subject with a ten-foot pole. We figured that that the personalities they thought they had married were probably not the personalities that they actually were. It is not uncommon for a man and woman to fall in love only to discover later that there was another annoying or unpleasant side to them, incompatible values, habits and behaviours that only appeared after marriage. Clearly, Kate and Hal's relationship was not what it should have been for an ostensibly compatible married couple.

In the final analysis, it was none of our business. We were not close enough to them to even make a hint. At the same time, Kate and Hal, especially Kate, should have made a greater effort not to display their differences in public where other people could hear and see them.

Nevertheless, despite all that I had seen, and as irrational as it sounds, I found myself becoming even more enamored of Kate during the road trip. As each day passed, I had to exert greater efforts to hide my growing attraction to her. It wasn't easy but I succeeded. So, absolutely nothing happened during the road trip, nada.

Toward the end or our road trip, it dawned on me that Kate was my Kryptonite. I figured everything would go back to normal once I was home. Little did I know.

This might be a good time for me to describe Kate. She was five years older than me. She was not by any means a 'classic' beauty. whatever that means, even in her youth. She did not have long endless legs, or baby-bearing hips, or big bonkers or even a figure to die for.

Kate had none of those features. Yet she was all woman and a tidy little package. She was petite, only five feet tall, and thin, almost frail. She probably weighed less than 100 pounds.

She had dark eyes, a cute snub nose, and very luscious kissable lips. Accepting the march of time, Kate never bothered to dye her hair. In fact, her greying hair actually looked quite attractive on her.

She had small breasts, although they looked normal-sized on her small frame. She sported a paunch, which was to be expected in most persons, male or female, in older people. Her legs were short but proportional to her height. They were attached to a little, yet very womanly, ass.

Kate was still very active and physically fit. She was a remarkably spry and healthy woman for her age. I thought she was absolutely scrumptious.

She not only attracted me physically, she also attracted me intellectually. She was very intelligent, knowledgeable and interesting. She did not have the benefit of a higher education, but she had more than made up for it with intellectual curiosity and a seemingly voracious appetite to learn more. She was a self-made intellectual who obtained her knowledge of the world through both frequent travel and her extensive, if omnivorous, non-fiction reading habits.

As the incident in Las Vegas proved, Kate was no shrinking violet despite her tiny size. Over the years, I had observed that short people often had strong personalities. She seemed to be one of those. She was very independently minded, strong willed, assertive, and competitive, characteristics that worked for me but, I knew, would, and did, turn off other types of men, who would see her as bitchy and aggressive.

By themselves, her personality and intelligence were more than enough to make us good friends without ever being lovers. And we did become good friends. We enjoyed each other's company with or without the presence of our spouses.

The problem, if I may call it that, was that the flame of my infatuation that was lit in Argentina, grew much stronger during our southwestern road trip. She literally began to stir my loins. I felt uneasy whenever I stood close to her. I wanted to wrap my arms around her.

While the head on my shoulders engaged in conversations with Kate about science, history and politics, as well as the usual mundane things that normally peppered discussions among sociable folks who like each other, the other head, the one tucked in my pants, increasingly saw Kate as a little sex goddess and the personification of erotic womanhood. It sent messages to my brain that imagined what it would be like to explore and feel her feminine delights and then bury myself between her lovely thighs, lodging my pulsing phallus in her clutching uterus. This second head was uninterested in science, history or politics. It wanted sex.

Maybe I was just kidding myself, but I thought I saw a similar sentiment in her eyes and in her studied propriety when I was nearby. In fact, I was sure that she was as attracted to me as I was to her.

There were, of course, two main obstacles to turning our erotic potential into something real: my wife and her husband.

At some point in the road trip, I could not help but acknowledge, at least to myself, that my sexual attraction to Kate was too obvious for me to ignore. To this day, I have no rational explanation for my overwhelming desire to mate with her. I had thoughts of taking her into my bed and make love to her until her pussy was sore and my cock was exhausted. I wanted to make her beg for mercy. I wanted to fill her womb with my sperm and make her pregnant. I wanted to show her what a real man could do.

Kate was definitely my Kryptonite. I considered myself to be a logical, rational, level-headed person who was normally quite cautious about making decisions or taking a course of action. She had me thinking illogically, irrationally, replete with sexual images and thoughts, which I had to suppress when in polite company. Somehow, she was penetrating my armor of moral rectitude.

As irrational as it sounds, I was very strongly protective of her even as I wished I could seduce her and make fierce love to her, husband or not. I was certain that, if I were in Hal's position, I would be thinking something quite differently. I would be thinking about protecting my mate from a rival male, except of course, I now knew that they did not sleep together, making her fair game.

However, as long as he was present, I would not so much as touch her. Interfering in my friends' relationships was absolutely taboo. I was till in possession of my morals, at least for now.

Usually my rational brain would stay in charge and keep my baser instincts under firm control. But there was something about her aura that seemed to energize something raw and primeval in me, something that weakened my usual rational self. Maybe she was emitting just the right kind of pheromones to weaken and break down my resistance. I don't know.

But alarm bells also sounded in my head. I had to remind myself that she had a husband and I had a wife. Cheating was something I had never seriously considered Having sex with your friend's spouse is supposed to be out of bounds. In the past, I had always followed that code.

So, I lusted after her secretly. My rational mind attempted to dissuade me from yearning for Kate by reminding me of her strong, willful and shrewish personality. Having sex with such an aggressive, even domineering female evoked images of a moth's fatal flight into the flame that attracted it, or worse, the female black widow spider eating its mate after mating.

Even more gruesome, if that is even possible, my mind evoked the image of a female praying mantis attracting a mate, and then eating him alive even while he was still spilling his seed into her body.

I likened Hal to a male praying mantis. 'Poor Hal,' I thought. Usually a very cautious person who avoided risks, I would not normally put myself in position a position like Hal's.

'Not so fast,' my baser-self urged, 'what guy doesn't like having his woman eat head? Besides, you know what she's like. You're no wuss. You can find a work-around. It's all in the approach. Not every male mantis gets his head bitten off, only the stupid ones.'

Whatever the internal conflict between my rational and baser selves, I was very definitely and intensely attracted to her. Damn! Let's be honest. I lusted after her like an instinct-driven male animal in rutting season. Exacerbating the situation, I grew ever more certain that I had some kind of power over her too. Animal magnetism was working in both directions. I could not help but think that, if I played my cards right, I could find myself in humping heaven.

The urge to take a risk was beginning to outweigh my normal inclinations toward cautiousness.

Nevertheless, on our two-couple road trip, we kept on our best behavior. Outwardly, we behaved like normal friends. No inappropriate touching took place. No verbal insinuations were made. However, on the rare occasions when I was alone with her, we engaged in some mild flirtation, but nothing more. She seemed to enjoy the attention and the flattery. I would be remiss if I did not mention that I enjoyed the same from her.

My baser self was never very helpful in keeping me on an even keel. It always thought about what it would like to have sex with her. 'If it's okay to screw your wife,' the animal in me rationalized, 'then how can it be wrong to screw your friends?' My rational mind told me that there was something not quite right about that logic.

When the tour ended, we parted ways and returned home. Now that my lustful flame was now almost 3,000 miles away, I figured things would return back to normal. And they did, more or less. You know, out of sight means out of mind. But that saying did not turn out to be so true.

Back home, I still fantasized about her and what it would be like to have sex with her. She stayed in my thoughts and fantasies for months. Although they lessened somewhat over time, they never entirely disappeared.

There was that something about Kate that appealed to me at a very basic instinctual level. Yet my attraction to her would have come to naught if life had continued as I had expected that it would, occasionally holidaying as two couples, and returning to our homes at opposite ends of the country and keeping in touch through an occasional email.

A Year Later

Another year went by. Then one day, Kate emailed me to ask if we, Lucy and I that is, would be interested in going on another road trip, this time from Seattle on the west coast to Boston on the east coast. The plan was to make a cross-country trip across the northern and central part of the country, do some sightseeing and then eventually arrive in Boston where her daughter from her first marriage and grandchildren lived. She thought we might be interested in joining them. Sharing costs, especially those related to the car, she reminded us, would make the road trip economical for all concerned and, of course, be lots of fun.

I agreed in principle to the idea but told her that I would have to consult my wife about it. I would get back to her.

My wife, it turned out, was not interested. I was not entirely surprised because she suffered from a mild form motion sickness. The earlier road trip was rough on her. She did not want to repeat long stretches of driving so soon after the last road trip. It was not her thing.